When First We Practice To Deceive
by Laburnum Steelfang
Summary: Aranea discovers exactly how unreliable a narrator her post-Scratch self really was. Or, Mindfang's story becomes even more tragic.


The teams had not lost their powers, and the alchemiters had come with them. Aranea reflected that this was terribly inconvenient for her. She vaguely remembered the end of the game, the sudden appearance of several people who bore striking resemblances to the players, a lot of shouting, and Damara running in her direction; next thing she knew, she was trapped in an empty room in the Lalonde residence, her hands bound to the wall with an alchemised chain that both - or all four - Zahhaks together couldn't break. Her glasses were sliding off; she tipped her head back to put them back into place, and glanced out the window to see the featureless plain on which various hives and houses had been mysteriously deposited. Apparently the others were too busy to get back to rebuilding as of yet.

A knock. "Yo, Serket, you decent in there?" The door opened before she could answer, and Meenah entered. Her face was drawn with tiredness, and she didn't look Aranea in the eye. "Hi." Aranea said nothing, and Meenah dropped down to kneel beside her. "Look, hon, I just wanna say I'm sorry your grand plan didn't work out. If it had ya'd be a hero."

"Yes." Aranea pulled gently at her cuffs, as if to check if they'd magically disappeared. "Where's Vriska?"

"Gettin' a talkin'-to from the Egberts and there's a long line waitin' for a turn, but she's breathin' and upright and gonna stay that way if I got a say."

"I saw a lot of purple blood. Are the Makaras okay?"

"Well, they stopped bleedin' but that ain't a yes. D-Meg and Strider have them in stasis same as they did you, still workin' out what to do with 'em. Candycorn-fang's nowhere to be found, Callie's workin' on it. Meulin's not stopped cryin' or washin' her hands, the purple's off but now she's bleedin'. Dunno why she's so upset about it, Kurlz needed manglin' if you ask me. Horuss is talkin' to her, I figured I best stay outta the way."

"Probably a good idea," Aranea said. "You never were much of a soothing presence."

"Yeah, that was your job." Meenah chuckled sadly, and looked up, her fangs digging into her lip. "Uh, I hate to make things worse, but... there's someone else wants to talk to you. You fit for visitors?"

"I doubt it, but I don't think I'll become any more so in here. Who is it?"

"Betta I just show ya..." Meenah stood up and went to the door, then held a hasty whispered conversation with someone behind it. She turned back, hissed "Good luck," and was gone.

The door swung wide, and Aranea blinked at the figure beyond. Small and skinny, a face barely discernible between a mass of hair and the high collar of a huge black greatcoat. The coat was trimmed with cerulean, and of appropriately high quality, but of a style centuries old, ragged and misbuttoned. Red boots peered out from underneath. Aranea peered closer, and blinked as she noticed the seven-pupilled eye.

"Vriska?"

"No," said the girl, brushing back her hair. "I'm Aranea Serket."

Aranea froze. The _other_ Aranea Serket? Mindfang! Of course! But why was she so... young? Had the game taken them all back to their starting age, ancestors included? No, that couldn't be right, Aranea herself didn't feel any younger and she knew she'd seen adults among the group before she was captured. And the coat was wrong. She squinted at it; the design was too recent. She wasn't an expert, but she'd guess it was designed in the time of the Summoner's rebellion, when Mindfang would have reached an unusually high age for an Alternian cerulean; certainly long after she was Vriska's age.

Mindfang saw Aranea's expression and shook her head. "Did you ever actually watch my life, or did you just pick it up from Vriska's?"

"I..." Aranea chewed her lip. No sense lying now. "Sorry, but yes, that is what I did. Time in the dreambubbles got weird, we only picked up bits until the other players arrived on Alternia and we could keep better track. I read all your journal along with her."

"Fuck that stupid thing!" Mindfang hissed. "Thanks to you and Vriska, nobody wants to talk to me because all anyone knows about me is shit that I never meant to be seen."

"What?"

Mindfang pulled a small sheaf of waterstained paper from her pocket and shook it at her. "I thought you were the resident genius. Didn't you notice the paper was much too intact for something that spent hundreds of sweeps in a shipwreck?"

"I'm sorry, old paper is old paper to me," Aranea said, shrugging as well as her bindings would let her. "I'm an expert on many things, but not that."

"Didn't you think it was odd that all the pailing scenes were so clumsy?"

"I've seen much worse. Cronus Ampora was on my team."

Mindfang sighed. "Well, they were. Didn't you even think that, you know, modelling yourself after a rapist wasn't your best idea? It certainly wasn't mine!"

"What are you talking about? You're not Mindfang, who are you?"

"Mindfang never existed," the girl said bluntly. "The Alternian Aranea Serket did. This is me at the same age I was when I died." She paused to let it sink in. Aranea's jaw dropped, and Mindfang continued. "I was an amateur writer in the days of the Summoner's rebellion. Fanfic was a thing back then too. I whiled away my time fantasising about doing something interesting instead of actually practising to do it, so I wasn't prepared when I got in a fight and lost my arm. I had no Zahhak to help me, so I patched it up myself and wrote the amputation scene on my sickbed to practice writing with my other hand. The eye loss part was just to make it more piratical."

Aranea continued to gape at the papers. "What? No..."

"Yes," Mindfang said, flicking through the papers. "The mind control was a thing I had for a while, I never actually did anything with it. I've spent long enough in the bubbles to know what was going on with that. I... I was so unpopular I honestly couldn't imagine anyone wanting me without it. I can tell you this, you're me. Or you thought you wanted to be, anyway."

"H-how did it get to the shipwreck, then?"

"I got in another fight and this time I didn't manage to clean the wound properly. A hazard of only having one hand. As I said, I didn't have a Zahhak," Mindfang said bitterly. "I died of the infection, and one of the neighbourhood kids who went through my stuff found it and took it. For self-pailing or for making fun of, I don't know. I'd guess it passed from hand to hand till someone found Dualscar's ship and decided to dump it there, along with my dice. I actually did design them, but I was utter shit at actually using the things. Maybe if I'd lived longer I'd have learned..." She put her hand in her pocket, and Aranea could hear clinking sounds under Mindfang's wistful sigh.

"But you could have been great if you lived, you could have become what you said you were-"

"Why would I want to?!" Mindfang asked, shocked. "I told you, the Marquise was terrible! I realised it was creepy like a week after I wrote it! Nobody was ever meant to see it, and I certainly wouldn't want to do that to anyone real! Why would _you_ want to?" Mindfang's face turned hard. "Oh wait. You did."

"What?! No I didn't-"

"Gamzee Makara!" Mindfang snapped. "You pushed your way into his fucking head because you thought you knew what was best and fucked with his and the Pyrope kid's relationship! If that's not mind-rape I don't know what is, it's just a different quadrant. Tell me, did you do it more to protect him or to protect everyone else from him? I want to know if it was pale or ashen! I don't care if he was a treacherous little shit, he did not deserve that!"

Aranea trembled as Mindfang loomed over her. "It's not like that, it's not, I swear..."

"God, you make me sick! I was so proud of writing sleazy bullshit, but I was a kid, you were old enough to know better than to take it seriously! And you based all _your_ bullshit on someone who was never real!" Mindfang slapped her with the diary pages to punctuate her shouting. "I was never a Marquise, I never earned a title at all! I wasn't fucking hatched until _centuries_ after Dualscar and Redglare died and I was three when Summoner did! I can still barely hold a sword! I never filled a quadrant! I never saw a bulge or nook that wasn't mine! Forget being the great pirate queen, I've never even _seen_ the ocean in real life! I..." The girl sagged, her hands braced against the wall, and a sob escaped her. Blue tears fell from her eyes onto Aranea's face. "I never even got to be _seven._ You even did that better than me."

"I..." Aranea struggled for words. "Mindfang, I'm-"

"No," the girl spat. "My _name_ is Aranea Serket. You keep the title. You earned it better than I did."

Aranea turned on her heel and fled, and Spinneret Mindfang rested her head on her knees and cried.


End file.
